The changes to American national forests upon the reintroduction of wolves (and thus a reduction in the deer population) were supposedly obvious to non-experts; similarly, changes based on the collapse of friendly species (such as chestnuts being destroyed by blight) were also somewhat obvious (but perhaps less so, if you didn’t know what chestnut trees looked like).
I do recall another ‘friendly’ species decline that was of economic importance besides bees—vultures in India have been mostly wiped out by a cattle drug, which means huge increases in the amount of feral dogs, which means an increase in rabies (for humans as well). In California, condors were mostly wiped out through a similar process (lead poisoning from eating animals that were shot with lead bullets is a major cause of death now) but it’s not obvious that the reduction of condors has been hugely impactful (probably because we have better systems for dealing with roadkill / animal carcasses that the condors had been dealing with for us before). With bees, it seems like we both successfully prevented their complete decline and found out that it wasn’t too costly to replace their pollination services—either with robots, as linked, or with humans, as was done in China.
The changes to American national forests upon the reintroduction of wolves (and thus a reduction in the deer population) were supposedly obvious to non-experts; similarly, changes based on the collapse of friendly species (such as chestnuts being destroyed by blight) were also somewhat obvious (but perhaps less so, if you didn’t know what chestnut trees looked like).
I do recall another ‘friendly’ species decline that was of economic importance besides bees—vultures in India have been mostly wiped out by a cattle drug, which means huge increases in the amount of feral dogs, which means an increase in rabies (for humans as well). In California, condors were mostly wiped out through a similar process (lead poisoning from eating animals that were shot with lead bullets is a major cause of death now) but it’s not obvious that the reduction of condors has been hugely impactful (probably because we have better systems for dealing with roadkill / animal carcasses that the condors had been dealing with for us before). With bees, it seems like we both successfully prevented their complete decline and found out that it wasn’t too costly to replace their pollination services—either with robots, as linked, or with humans, as was done in China.